One-third of workplace accommodation requests are ignored or take over a month — destroying the 'interactive process' the ADA requires

The ADA mandates an 'interactive process' between employer and employee to determine reasonable accommodations. In practice, this process is broken. Survey data shows that more than one-third of employees who request an accommodation either wait longer than a month for a decision or never hear back at all. 25% of disabled workers report experiencing discrimination during job interviews. When employers do respond, they frequently reject requests outright, labeling them 'unreasonable' without analysis, and offer vague invitations to discuss unnamed 'alternative accommodations' — effectively putting the burden back on the disabled employee to negotiate from a position of weakness. The human cost is not abstract. A software engineer with ADHD who requests noise-cancelling headphones and a quiet workspace waits six weeks, hears nothing, and meanwhile their performance reviews suffer because they cannot concentrate in an open office. An employee with chronic pain who needs a standing desk submits documentation from two doctors, gets denied, submits an appeal, waits another month, and by then has used up all their sick leave managing pain flare-ups caused by sitting eight hours a day. The accommodation that would have cost $300 and taken one day to implement instead generates months of HR back-and-forth, lost productivity, medical leave costs, and potential EEOC complaints that cost both sides tens of thousands of dollars. JAN data shows that the median cost of a workplace accommodation is literally $0 (most involve schedule or policy changes), and when there is a cost, the median is $300. Employers are spending more on the process of denying accommodations than the accommodations themselves would cost. This problem persists because most HR departments are not trained in disability accommodation and treat requests as legal liabilities rather than operational problems. The 'interactive process' has no statutory timeline — the ADA does not specify how many days an employer has to respond — so there is no enforcement mechanism for delay. Small and mid-size companies often have no dedicated accommodation coordinator, meaning requests land on the desk of a generalist HR person who is afraid of setting precedent and defaults to slow-walking or denying. The EEOC is chronically understaffed and can only investigate a fraction of complaints, so employers face minimal consequences for non-compliance.